Author Archives: wkarons

Dear Readers, I really hope you have plans to be out watching some live performance in the next few weeks – because there is just so much on offer that it would be a shame if you missed out. Here’s a run down of my plans for the next two weeks – I invite you to join me!

This week, you can get a good laugh at local and national current events and help out the Greater Pittsburgh Food Bank all in one festive evening: the annual satire/fundraiser Off the Record is Thursday, Oct. 4 at the Byham. The cheap seats start at $31.25 but I know you’re not cheap when it comes to charity, right? Splurge for the orchestra section, it’s for a good cause.

The weekend brings three openings: Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudiceat the Pittsburgh Public Theatre, the opening of a new play by Liza Birkenmeier called The Way Out West at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, and the opening of Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters at the University of Pittsburgh. I’m excited about the first because I am a Jane Austen fan through and through (but you probably guessed that about me, didn’t you?) and because I really dug this script when I read it a few months ago. I’m thrilled about the second because this is the first play commissioned by the School of Drama, and Birkenmeier has found a subject of deep interest to explore: the group of young scientists who traveled to the wilds of the desert in Los Alamos in the early 1940s to work on a project that remained a mystery to the majority of them. And the third? Well, Nguyen’s work is completely new to me, which is always exciting, and since I don’t post about student work, if you are as curious to discover his work as I am, you’ll need to see it yourself.

The Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts continues! This weekend, Joan Didion’s The White Album plays at the August Wilson Center Friday through Sunday. The children’s show Gab Squad is also on, Wednesday through Saturday. You can still catch the installation Beyond: Playmodes, and if you are making plans for next week – and you should be making plans for next week! – coming up are In the Tunnel (from Israel); What’s That? (from the Ukraine); and Deborah Colker Dance (from Brazil – one night only, Oct 13).

Speaking of the Festival of Firsts – I wanted to write a tiny bit more about Blind Cinema. I sought out a chance to speak with Seth Laidlaw, the Education Program Manager at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, because I was curious about how the kids were instructed and trained to narrate the film. He told me that Britt Hatzius began by explaining how simultaneous audio narration is a means by which the blind often experience film, and that there are people trained to do what she was going to teach the kids to do in the 90 minute workshop. She then had them practice describing photographs to each other, with an emphasis on describing details, using lots of adjectives, and trying to make the description even more interesting and compelling than the photo they were looking at. They then practiced describing the action of a short piece of film. She worked with them on keeping their voice in a whisper, even when they got excited by what they were seeing, and encouraged them to react as they might naturally react to what they saw, but to remember that they needed to focus on details and on storytelling.

I was also interested in knowing more about the children’s experience of Blind Cinema, because in a sense the kids were both audience to and performer of the film. I had the chance to speak with 11-year-old Mia, a student at Holy Trinity who was one of the “whisperers.” She told me that she thought the whole experience was pretty great – not only did she think the movie was pretty cool, but she also enjoyed feeling that she had the responsibility to help another person understand what she was seeing. She said that she tried to give vivid information, because she realized that she needed to give as much detail as possible in order for her listeners to be able to see what she saw. At the same time, she also confessed that much as she liked the movie while she was narrating it, she didn’t really understand the whole thing until she had a chance to think about it afterward.

In the course of our conversation I gained a greater appreciation of the gap between what can be known from seeing something first hand, and what can be gleaned from verbal description. It turns out that there were many events in the film that I had forgotten, or simply failed to fully visualize – for example, one of Mia’s strongest memories of the film was of a gorilla: at one point the boy puts the eggshells in a gorilla’s hand and then the egg becomes whole again, grows feathers, and disappears. When she mentioned the gorilla, I vaguely recalled having that narrated to me, but because at that point in the film I was struggling to find a visual world into which I could integrate an office building, rubble, fireworks, eggshells, drawn/drewed doors, etc., I completely failed to picture “gorilla” and as a result it didn’t stick in my memory – whereas for Mia, the gorilla was a potent visual image that persisted. Moreover, I suspect it never occurred to any of the kids to include the one piece of information that would most help their listeners understand the film’s visual world – that is, the film’s genre/style. I asked two other adults who had “seen” the film, and they both reported having thought, like me, that the film was some mix of animation and live action. According to Mia, the whole film had real people (and a real gorilla) and real locations – at one point, she said, there was a photograph of a building that turned into a real building, but otherwise it was a live action film. I don’t fault the kids for omitting that information – after all, the vast majority of movies are live action, so it makes sense to assume that your listener would be visualizing a live action film and wouldn’t need to be told so specifically. And yet it’s fascinating that all three of us blindfolded adults (small sample, I know, but I bet we were not alone) arrived at the conclusion that the strange shifts in locale and character that were being narrated to us must have been facilitated through animation or some other filmic trick.

Now, with that information, my own visual memory of the film has started to revise itself, so that Blind Cinema continues to play in my consciousness, long after the “performance” itself has ended.

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The title of Kenneth Lonergan’s play might have you imagining a caped crusader who keeps the entryways of buildings free of crime and rescues hapless suitcase-toting visitors from evil villains. If so, you’re ripe to appreciate the sly irony Lonergan brings to this fiercely engaging play about crime, punishment, and the people whose job it is to keep us secure.

Lonergan’s central character is Jeff (Gabriel King), a 27-year-old sadsack “security officer” who is trying to scrape his life back together after a series of unexceptional failures. His job is anything but superheroic: he works the night shift at a mid-scale apartment building in New York, logging visitors in and out of the building and fighting mainly to stay awake so that his rule-bound supervisor, William (Rico Romalus Parker), doesn’t fire him. The most exciting thing that happens on his shift is a regular visit by a pair of cops, the veteran Bill (Patrick Jordan) and his rookie partner Dawn (Jessie Wray Goodman), the latter of whom is a primary object of Jeff’s romantic and sexual fantasies.

You might be forgiven for expecting something explosive to happen that requires these two pairs of cops and rent-a-cops to band together to cope with some high-stakes crisis. But the fireworks here are all interpersonal. Lonergan’s craft as a playwright is impeccable: he carefully winds up a set of conflicts that bring all four characters into each other’s orbits during the first act, and then sets their choices and actions ricocheting consequentially off each other in the second.

Thematically, the play touches on a number of issues that are topping the daily headlines, including workplace sexual harassment (a battle Dawn is fighting), abuse of force by the police, the scarcity of good jobs for the working class, and the maltreatment of black defendants in the criminal justice system. The tendency of those in power to close ranks around their own gets some exploration here, as does the ugly, testosterone-fueled behavior of men in groups.

Mostly, though, Lobby Hero is an at times quite comic exploration of what happens to people who find themselves on the back end of bad choices. As the story develops, the characters each find themselves maneuvering to save their own skins, which leads to shifting alliances and unexpected betrayals. Lonergan’s themes are serious, but his touch is light, and the barebones ensemble straddles the line between earnestness and comic delivery with finesse. Director Melissa Martin uses the small space to good advantage – the playing style is naturalistic, and the actors bring emotional nuance and psychological depth to the character work. Jordan plays the uber-entitled white male cop Bill with sensitivity, opening space for us to understand (and maybe even sympathize with) the motivations and actions of an otherwise fairly unlikeable character. As Dawn, Goodman threads a difficult needle – the character is a tough cookie who nevertheless has a lot of insecurities, fears, and vulnerabilities, and Goodman shapes her emotional journey with subtlety. Parker does an masterful job of embodying the moral dilemma into which William is thrown during the course of the play and also of conveying the simmering anger of a man who thinks he has mastered the system only to find himself thrown into its cogs. Anchoring this production is Gabriel King, who is absolutely superb as the nervous-energy-charged Jeff. King’s comic sensibility is exquisite, and he is both charming and a little cringe-inducing as a motormouth whose lack of filters not only inadvertently triggers the central conflict between Dawn and Bill, but also gets his boss William into hot water with the law.

By play’s end, as Jeff emerges from his existential crisis looking like someone ready to start thinking about maybe taking some baby steps to perhaps take charge of his life, you may find yourself rethinking what it means for someone to be a hero – or, at the very least, you may find yourself starting to get on board with Lonergan’s ironic deflation of the label. For it’s through that diminishment that Lonergan gets at the heart of what it means to really offer a compelling dramatic conflict – that is, that even small and quiet lives are full of moments of recognition and reversal worthy of our empathy and engagement.

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I fear my powers of description are not up to the task of describing the delights of Cirque Éloize Hotel. This troupe from Quebec – which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year – serves up a mix of breathtakingly beautiful and awe-inspiring acrobatics, juggling, clowning, dance, and music from a company of performers whose talents seem to have no limits.

The setting is the lobby of an Art Deco-ish hotel vaguely reminiscent of Wes Andersen’s Hotel Budapest. Into this lobby come people of many stripes, and they connect, interact, bounce off each other (both figuratively and literally), and fall in and out of love. Everything here is in motion: suitcases, telephones, doors, sofas – all slide or bounce or fly in and out of the space, sometimes animated by the performers, sometimes on their own accord; likewise, acrobatic props like juggling balls and hula hoops and Cyr Wheels and aerial ropes fall from the flies or swing in from the wings, to be used in an act and then suddenly disappear again, swallowed up by the commotion of ever-shifting activity. The stage picture is one of constant kinetic energy, like a pinball machine, as the entire company suddenly appears on stage for a chaotic scramble in transition from one acrobatic act to the next, or as areas of the set light up suddenly to reveal a performer swinging in the air, or balancing on another’s hands, or scrambling comically up, over, and around the diamond-shaped set.

As I suppose you’d expect from highly trained circus performer-athletes, the acrobatics defy the laws of gravity, physics, and human anatomy in ways that are gasp-worthy and sometimes a little terrifying. The acts are all incredible – and I use that word in its literal sense, as in: it’s hard to believe they are actually happening – and the range of skills each performer possesses makes them seem like a race of superhumans, as in: she can fly through the air with the greatest of ease AND play the Klezmer trumpet too? Among my favorite acts were Cory Marsh’s Cyr Wheel routine (which was anything but routine!), Philippe Dupuis’ completely insane juggling (at one point he had something like ten items in play; a quick search of the internet shows that this is pretty close to the limit of the number of objects a juggler can handle), and the final “surprise” set in which all of the members of the company performed a bunch of freakily difficult-looking tricks on a pair of vertical poles. Antonin Wicky and Jérémy Vitupier are the genial clowns of the show – Wicky has a very funny set in which he appears to bumble his way painfully across the set. The company includes two sets of beautifully matched “hand acrobatics” partners in Julius Bitterling/César Mispelon and Andrei Anissimov/Emma Rogers (in the latter pair, Rogers launches herself into the air to her partner as if she’s a flying bird). Rounding out the company are aerialists Una Bennett and the leggy, glamorous Tuedon Ariri, and the clowning acrobat Cooper Lee Smith. A highlight of the show is the music, which has a rich variety of texture and mood, and prominently features vocalist Sabrina Halde, who has a smoky, rich voice reminiscent of Adele.

You have another three chances to catch Cirque Éloize: Hotel at the Benedum – it closes on September 30. I’ll leave you with a video to whet your appetite:

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Dear Reader, over the next 6 weeks or so I’m going to be writing about the Pittsburgh Festival of Firsts (FoF) in addition to the fall season of plays at our local theaters. If you don’t know what the Festival of Firsts is, well, all I can say is: get your head out from under that rock, high thee over to the Cultural Trust website, and make plans to see some of the performance and visual art that will have its World, US, or regional premiere right here in the ‘Burgh! You don’t want to be one of those people who read my post and think to yourself, “Dang, I can’t believe I missed that!” Most of the artists will only be here for a very, very short window, so by the time you read about it here they will likely be gone, and you will be kicking yourself. Seriously, don’t miss out – the last two Festivals were paradigm-shifting, game-changing, life-altering, and just plain made those of us who attended them glad to be alive.

Okay, done shilling for the Cultural Trust. On to Blind Cinema –

Photo by Kitoko Chargois on behalf of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

I’m not quite sure what to call Belgian film/media/performance artist Britt Hatzius’s Blind Cinema: it’s a hybrid of film and spoken word “performance” that defies easy categorization. It’s certainly an experience, and an unusual one at that. Here’s what happens: you are handed a blindfold as you enter the cinema and are then shown to a seat. Behind you is an empty row. A film begins – it’s a film of an animated white dot on a black background. The dot descends from the top of the screen and wanders around the frame, and then expands to fill the entire screen with bright white light. At that point, you are instructed to put on the blindfold. You hear shuffling around and behind you, and soon the (nine- to eleven-year-old) child who takes a seat behind you places a tube with two cones attached at your shoulder – one cone for you, and one cone for your adult neighbor. You hold the cone to your ear. The child introduces herself: “Hi, my name is ______ and I’m going to be narrating the film for you.” And then she starts to whisper in the tube, describing a film that she is seeing for the first time. About a third of the way through, there’s a pause, and suddenly, surprisingly, a new voice begins to whisper in the tube. And then, after another bit of time, that voice stops, there’s a pause, and a third whisperer takes over describing what’s on the screen. The film ends, the children quietly leave their seats, and when you finally remove your blindfold, the collective group of kids is standing in front of the screen.

Photo by Kitoko Chargois on behalf of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

The film they describe seems complicated, with many layers of narration and/or reality. From what I could gather, there’s a room, and a child in the room who is looking at books, and the film shows what is in the books. There’s also a projector and a screen in the room, and the child turns on the projector and watches a film-within-the-film that features a large office building with a lot of windows. Within that film, as far as I could make out (and as much as I can now remember) there is a sequence in which someone draws a scene that the characters in the film-within-the-film can enter. The action seems to bounce back and forth between the room with the child, and the world of the film-within-the-film, and the animated/drawn sequences within that world. Something happens that involves a lot of flashes of light, and at one point the room is reduced to rubble. There is a flashlight that turns into a white dot searching across the screen – a clue that the one bit of film we saw before we put on our blindfolds was a scene, somehow, from the film the children get to watch – and there is also an egg, which the child shells and eats, and later in the film the egg grows large and somehow floats up in the sky and joins the stars.

In the moment, I found it surprisingly difficult to visualize what was being described to me, particularly because none of my whisperers gave any clue as to the style or genre of the film they were watching. Although the first scene we watched was clearly animation, for reasons I can’t explain my brain defaulted to imagining that the film was live action, with real actors, and as a result, when my whisperer started to describe some of the more “unreal” events – such as the sequence in which a door was drawn inside a window and a person stepped through that door – I found it difficult to slot what I was being told into the schema my brain had already constructed. At times I even stopped trying to get myself to form pictures in my mind of what the whisperer was describing, often because I couldn’t figure out how to make the transition from the picture I already had in my head to the image that was being described. Nevertheless – and even though, days later, my memory of the narration has become a little hazy – “images” from this film that I never saw continue, improbably, to bubble up in my visual imagination. The sensation is odd, more like remembering a dream on which you have a tenuous hold than recalling a real-life experience: an egg being cracked on top of the head of a young boy with dark curly hair; stars that look like x’s with a square in the middle; a set of windows with a door drawn in the middle; a shelf with three books, one red and one green (there was a third color, but I forget); a boy standing on the books so that he can reach the projector; fireworks; a huge pile of eggshells on the floor.

Blind Cinema is disorienting in the best and most literal sense of that word: it shifts your orientation, not only because you can’t see what is being described, or because you are dependent on both the observational and descriptive powers of a young person who may or may not be able to fully narrate what she or he is seeing, but also because your experience of time is mediated and shaped by a child’s moment to moment reaction to what is happening in the film. Some of the best moments of Blind Cinema, for me, were when my whisperer was taken by surprise, or started editorializing. At one point the first whisperer exclaimed, in excitement and shock, “Oh! Oh! He’s putting the egg on his head!” and then calmed down – “oh, good, oh, okay, it’s cooked, that’s okay.” At another point, the second child commented, “So now he’s going into the door that was drawed, or drawn, or drewed…I don’t know which, I’m not very good at that kind of grammar, but anyway – he goes through the door of the drawing…”; and later, he cried out, “Oh, ow! Okay, there are a lot of really bright flashing lights, it hurts my eyes, ow!” followed by a long pause, during which I imagined that he must have closed his eyes for a bit, too. After that, there was a poignant moment of editorializing: “Oh, this is so sad. Oh, no. Oh….now it’s back at the room, but it’s all rubble. Oh.”

Such moments didn’t necessarily help me visualize what was on the screen, but they gave me a far more potent emotional and psychological experience than I expect watching the film ever could. For childhood is a lost country; we all experienced it, but most of us can’t truly remember what it was like to think and feel and perceive as a young child. Yet at those points in the narration when the child-whisperers reacted spontaneously to film’s odd surprises, it felt as if a tiny portal of access to that lost country had opened up again.

The narrator-whisperers. Photo by Kitoko Chargois on behalf of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

Next up: Cirque Eloize Hotel(FoF) at the Benedum. And this weekend, barebones productions opens Lobby Heroat their space in Braddock. Those of you with kids might want to make plans to take them to see Gab Squad(FoF), which opens next Wednesday.

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The characters in Lauren Gunderson’s 2016 play The Revolutionists are all fascinating, powerful women from the history of the French Revolution: playwright Olympe de Gouges (Daina Michelle Griffith), an early feminist who authored the “Declaration of the Rights of Women,” Charlotte Corday (Moira Quigley), the Girondiste who murdered the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub; Marie Antoinette (Drew Leigh Williams), the recently deposed Queen of France; and “La Marianne” – not really a historical figure, but a symbol of the revolution, here fleshed out as the fictional Marianne Angelle, a Caribbean freedom fighter (Shamika Cotton). These four figures would likely never have come together in history (they shared neither political orientation nor class/social status), but in Gunderson’s imagining they have something in common – they are all women whose stories have been wrested from them by history, and who, each in their own right, exhibited a heroism overlooked or underrecognized by the historical record.

It’s up to Olympe de Gouges to write them back into history, or at least that seems to be the driving force behind the play’s action. De Gouges is trying to write a play – perhaps, even, the play we are watching – but both the form and content elude her, until Marianne, Charlotte, and Marie invade her space and demand her help, because “everyone needs a writer for some purpose.” The interactions between the four women provide opportunity for illumination into what they have in common (motherhood, children, a proto-feminist consciousness, a desire to have their perspective heard and recognized) and also into the ways their legacies have been erased or distorted.

Dear Reader, I wanted to like this play and production much more than I did. I’m always up for a good revisionist view of history – especially a feminist one! – and any production that prominently features not only an all-female creative team, but a racially diverse one at that, already has me in its palm. But alas, I found myself unable to board its train, primarily because the play seems unable to decide, from among the many things it touches upon, what it really wants to be about. The closest I could come to pinpointing an “aboutness” to this play was that it seeks to spin out the ways in which the social and political differences between these four figures ought to have been overshadowed by their shared oppression as women – that their sororité could or should have eclipsed all other divisions between them. But otherwise we don’t get much revision of history here, at least not in any detailed or rich sense. Instead, much of the play’s energy is devoted to self-referential reflections on the job of the playwright to write these women back into history, which makes for a kind of clever joke the first few times we hear it, but soon grows tiresome and overdone. By the end of the play, the idea that it’s up to de Gouges to “write their story” has been repeated so many times that you may find yourself, as I did, mentally humming that tune from Hamilton.

Overall, the production – which was directed by Jade King Carroll – lacks a clear shape and forward momentum and feels overly effortful where it should be light and bouncy. The first act takes a long time to get its gears in motion, and then once the train is on the tracks it’s not very clear where we are headed. Nonetheless, Gunderson deploys an anachronistically modern language in the dialogue that often provides a nice frisson of humor – there are some good laughs along the way. Among the cast, Williams in particular, as Marie Antoinette, seems to capture the tone and spirit of Gunderson’s comedy; she also manages to finesse the play’s difficult transition to the dark part of history (in which the three “real” historical figures all end up on the scaffold with “Madame Guillotine”). And visually, the production is compelling: backgrounded by Anne Mundell’s fleur de lys and chandelier-strewn set, the four ladies look gorgeous in costume designer Susan Tsu’s 18th-century inspired clothes and wigs, and sound designer Fan Zhang and lighting designer Nicole Pearce have collaborated to find a theatrically effective solution for depicting the play’s fifth character, “Madame Guillotine.”

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In his Hamburg Dramaturgy, the 18th-century German playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing claimed for theater, above all other arts, the capacity to arouse in an audience member a feeling that he termed Mitleid. That word, if you were to translate it literally, would be something like “suffering with”; Lessing theorized that drama achieved its greatest effect when spectators found themselves in a state of Mitleid with the character or characters in the play. The closest equivalent we have in English is probably “empathy” (although that’s far too modern a word for Lessing); other equivalents are “sympathy” or “compassion” (which is the term we used to translate Mitleid in our new translation of Lessing’s text). But there isn’t really a good English word to capture that sense of being with someone in their anguish and distress that the German term carries with it in its root of Leid.

Why am I talking about the translation of a German word in a post about Kinetic Theatre Company’s production of The Father? Well, because in fact, when I think about it, I can’t recall many experiences of theater in which I truly felt that I was “suffering with” a character in a play. I can think of instances where I felt sorry for a character (pity, compassion), or could imagine myself in their situation (empathy), or could identify with them on some level (sympathy). But truly suffer with them? That’s rare.

And that’s precisely the experience French playwright Florian Zeller offers in his masterfully constructed play The Father (the excellent translation is by Christopher Hampton). The central character – the father of the title – is Andre (the marvelous and heartbreaking Sam Tsoutsouvas), a retired engineer who suffers from dementia. He has an adult daughter, Anne (Catherine Gowl), and – at least as far as he knows – he lives in a large, beautifully appointed, immaculately clean apartment in Paris. At first, it seems that our glimpse into Andre’s condition will be mediated by Anne’s experience of coping with the symptoms of his dementia, that is, with his forgetfulness, his irritability, his hostile aggression toward the caregivers she employs, and his lack of understanding about what is happening to him.

Sam Tsoutsouvas in The Father; Photo by Bea Nyilis courtesy of Kinetic Theatre Company

But we quickly come to realize that our point of identification is not Anne; it’s Andre himself, and the playwright has contrived to structure his scenes so that Andre’s experience of reality is replicated in our experience of the play. In the first scene, Anne tells Andre that she is about to move to London with her new boyfriend; in the second, a man (Gregory Johnstone) comes into the room and patiently reintroduces himself to Andre as Anne’s husband of the past decade. In the next scene, a different woman (Lisa Ann Goldsmith) arrives and claims to be Anne, and when a confused Andre asks after the husband, she gently reminds him that she is not married. In later scenes, Anne and her husband Pierre (now played by a different actor, Darren Eliker) try to get Andre to accept a new caregiver, Laura (Erin Lindsey Krom). Andre likes Laura because she looks like his other daughter Elise, whom he thinks is travelling but who is in fact deceased. Imagine his distress when Laura returns to take care of him the following day and no longer looks anything at all like Elise. This type of switcheroo continues, scene after scene after scene. Not only do people get mixed up, but time does too – we see and experience (with Andre) events happening in one order, or on one time scale; but then other characters in the play gently contradict our experience of time, explaining that things have, in fact, been happening in a different order, or occurred longer ago than Andre (and we) believe they did.

You could imagine a play or film in which a group of characters conspire to screw with someone’s sanity in such a manner, as part of an elaborate and cruel practical joke. That’s also one way to figure what it must feel like to suffer from Alzheimer’s or dementia – it must feel as if the world is conspiring to undermine your understanding of reality at every turn, by fucking around with the cast of characters who populate your world and making hay with the order of events and the flow of time. And as Andre suffers from the confusion and bafflement produced by his dementia, we find ourselves sharing in his bewilderment and in his incapacity to distinguish memory from present reality. At any given moment, it’s unclear whether what we are observing on stage is actually happening or only playing out in Andre’s mind, as reality, memory, and hallucination collide before our eyes.

Zeller’s play also opens an empathic window into the emotional lability of a person with dementia. Most of us would become enraged, too, if some person we had never seen before walked into our home and insisted that they were the caregiver we had met just the day before. We, too, might respond to the tenuousness of our hold on reality by perseverating irritatingly on some beloved comfort item – a watch, for example – or by treating the family members who have the difficult task of caring for us with cruel dismissiveness.

Johnmichael Bohach’s eloquent scenic design plays a prominent role in the storytelling. The apartment morphs and changes throughout the play, subtly at first but then – in parallel with Andre’s loss of self – gradually losing its familiar features and becoming another space entirely. Tellingly, the unpredictability of the environment is at odds with the efforts, on the part of caregivers, to impose structure and order on Andre’s life, as evidenced, for example, in repeated urgings along the lines of “let’s get dressed now.” The production makes clear just how nonsensical and baffling such attempts at order must seem to a person whose surroundings appear to be changing inexplicably around them.

The Father is a structurally and emotionally complicated play, but director Andrew Paul makes it look easy. He has taken an understated approach that works beautifully: many of the scenes feel as if the characters are walking on eggshells with held breath. This feels right both as a depiction of what it feels like to be a caregiver to a person with dementia, and as an imagining of what a person with dementia might feel as they navigate a world in which reality shuffles around them like a jigsaw puzzle with interchangeable pieces. We suffer with them all, and in so doing, gain a world of understanding and insight into a devastating condition.

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Well, that depends on how much you trust the historical record, and, I guess, whether you believe anything can be verified by documents at all. The “real” Thomas Chatterton was a historical personage – an 18th-century English poet who committed suicide at the age of 17, after having invented a 15th-century poet, Thomas Rowley, and published a series of “found” poems under that assumed identity. The “fictional” Thomas Chatterton of Quantum Theatre’s adaptation of Peter Ackroyd’s 1987 novel Chatterton is, like his model, a forger of documents, and the trail of fakery he may or may not have left in his wake casts doubt on what seems to be a clear historical record. In this version, even his suicide may have been faked – or accidental – or real – and the same goes for a whole host of poems by later (and greater) poets whose work the fictional (or was it real?) Chatterton may or may not have imitated or forged after he supposedly did or didn’t die.

Are you confused? Complicating things further – for the audience member at least – is that at any given moment in the story you have only a very partial and incomplete picture of any of the three or four story lines that zip past each other and occasionally intersect in the course of a peripatetic three hours. Like Quantum’s 2014 production of Tamara, this production asks the audience to follow the characters through the space, trotting from room to room of the byzantine Trinity Cathedral as the action bounces from time period to time period and story line to story line.

If you start the evening with a quill (as I did), you’ll mostly follow Chatterton (Jonathan Visser) himself as he tells you about his early life and freely confesses his invention of “Rowley” as a means of rising out of Bristolian poverty and establishing himself as a writer and poet. His story line is interrupted by scenes from “the present” (although a present that looks more like 1960 than 2018), in which well-known author Harriet Scrope (Helena Ruoti) has a terrible case of writer’s block and also schemes for reasons that are never completely clear to keep a younger author, Charles Wychwood (Tony Bingham), from cracking the mystery of whether or not Chatterton really committed suicide, and in which Merk (Tim McGeever), the assistant to a recently deceased painter, sells forgeries of that painter’s work to Mr. Leno (Alan Stanford), begging the question – as do Chatterton’s poems – of what constitutes a “real” work of art.

If you start the evening with a typewriter, as my date for the evening did, you spend more time with Scrope, Wychwood, and his friend Philip (Martin Giles) – a librarian, I believe? – and you learn a few secrets about them that we quill-followers weren’t privy to – for example, that Scrope may have plagiarized her first “breakthrough” novel.

And if you start the evening with a pen – well, I can’t tell you what you’ll learn, because unfortunately there wasn’t anyone near me from that track at the (very lovely) dinner that is served around 9 pm, so I wasn’t able to pick their brains about what they experienced while I was chasing after Chatterton and Merk, the art forger (pro tip: go in a group of three and take different tracks – and/or be much more outgoing about grilling your dinner companions than I was!)

Post-dinner, a third time period pulls into view, one in which painter Henry Wallis (Martin Giles) – the 19th-century artist who created a famous painting of Chatterton on his deathbed – convinces poet George Meredith (also a historical figure) to pose as Chatterton for his painting and at the same time falls in love with Meredith’s wife, Mary Ellen (Gayle Pazerski). Pazerski also plays Wychwood’s wife in the present day, who ends up falling in love with Philip after Wychwood dies of some mysterious illness that may have been explained in a track that I was not on.

As you can see from my description, there’s a lot about Chatterton that I can’t describe to you, because even with my partner taking a different track I wasn’t fully able to piece together the whole from its parts. Unlike in Tamara, where you could choose to follow one character through the entire story and thereby glean a full picture of that character’s experience in the world of the play, here the tracks are pre-determined and give you only limited – and frequently obstructed – glimpses of any one character’s journey. This not only makes the story perplexing but also keeps you from connecting to any of the characters – by the time we sat down for dinner almost two hours into the show I still hadn’t found a character whose dilemma I truly cared about.

The sense of ungroundedness to the action is compounded by the space in which the show takes place. A good deal of the action has been staged in the cavernous sanctuary of Trinity Cathedral, where the acoustics render much of the actors’ dialogue unintelligible and it’s not always clear where we are (in the world of the play, that is). Moreover, much as I love the feeling of adventure and scavenger hunt that goes along with scurrying after the actors as they go from scene to scene, it felt, in this case, as if the purpose of our moving from room to room was to replicate a cinematic structure rather than a theatrical adventure.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of ambition behind this production, and the thematic material being worked here feels very much aimed at our present historical moment. I have not read Ackroyd’s novel; I imagine, from this adaptation, that much of its punch and pleasure derives from a deployment of unreliable narration – that is, that as a reader you are constantly having the rug yanked out from underneath you by new information whose veracity is destabilized by your uncertainty about whether or not to trust the source. Writer/director Karla Boos and her writing partner Martin Giles seem, at any rate, to have sought to give their audience that experience of destabilization – we’re never sure who to trust here, or which documents are real, and as we watch characters later in history give credence to documents that scenes from earlier in history demonstrated to have been deliberately forged – or maybe not – we get the impression that the entire edifice on which the historical record rests could be as flimsy as a house of cards. That’s certainly a potent metaphor for the era of so-called “fake news” we currently inhabit.

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There’s a sequence near the end of Beth Corning’s new dance piece The Waiting Room that struck a deep nerve with me. Performer Jacob Goodman begins to spin a simple pine coffin around a circle, like the hand of a clock, spinning it faster and faster as other dancers rush in, bearing the kinds of mundane objects that consume our days – a bowl of soup, a newspaper, an outfit – and scrambling to keep up with the spinning coffin. In the background, a fire begins to glow on the three projected screens, the dancer’s movements become more and more desperate, the rhythmic string music becomes more and more urgent, the coffin, and time, relentlessly spin on, the projections morph into an all-consuming forest fire, and suddenly the group of dancers stops, gestures, and disbands, leaving Goodman alone with the coffin once again.

Why did that sequence strike a nerve? Maybe it’s because, well, right now I’m sitting at my computer, staring at a screen, trying to convey my experience of the piece, and simultaneously struggling with the question of whether or not doing this is a valuable way to spend the precious minutes allotted to me. Am I simply allowing my time to be eaten up by life’s tasks – the meals prepared, the websites clicked on, the emails dealt with, the blog posts posted – while that coffin-clock hand spins down the hours to my certain death?

Such are the existential questions provoked by The Waiting Room. Goodman plays a Shomer, the man tasked, in the Jewish tradition, with guarding a dead body overnight before its burial. Actually, he’s a last-minute substitute for the regular Shomer, and because he’s been called in unexpectedly, he’s not fully prepared for the job. He’s forgotten his prayer book, so instead of reciting prayers, he begins to conjure – memories, stories, vignettes, dreams, fears, and images. A childhood story of watching a woman in a neighboring apartment undress. A memory of his mother’s cooking. Dreams of swimming.

Structured as it is around the stories the Shomer tells his dead companion to fill the hours of vigil, this dance theater piece is more narrative than most of Corning’s work, but like most of her work it also slides easily between the concreteness of language and the fuzzy indecisiveness of image and metaphor. Vignettes from the Shomer’s childhood morph from the mundane to the sublime, as if being co-present with death has made him – and us – more alert to the dimensions of being alive – pushing back against the truism, projected at one point on the screen, that “we live as if we don’t know about the certainty of death.” Iain Court’s lighting design gives the dance sequences that alternate with the narrative a quality of otherworldliness, making the “waiting room” a liminal space between life and death, where things that are actually present and things that are present only in imagination or memory collide, interact, share space, and activate each other.

Goodman brings a winning ease to the role of the Shomer, both as an actor and dancer, and his familiarity with Jewish tradition allows him to downplay what might seem odd about the tradition to those unfamiliar with it and to call attention, instead, to the way in which being co-present with the dead becomes an opportunity to connect with the divine and reflect on our own mortality. Catherine Meredith is mysterious and languid as the neighbor whose undressing fascinated the Shomer in his childhood, and Beth Corning brings humor tinged with melancholy to her portrayal of the Jewish mother, always with an offer of (too much) food. Corning’s always-illuminating and captivating choice of music is enhanced, in this production, by the addition of the voice and presence of John Carson, who plays the imagined deceased “Phil” (at least, that’s what I took him to be) and sings, toward the end of the performance, a haunting Irish melody. Stephanie Meyer-Staley’s scenic design looks deceptively simple, but eloquent touches – like the stones that weigh down the scroll-like screens, which evoke the Jewish tradition of placing pebbles on gravestones – add unexpected depth and poignancy to the visual field. Projections by Jakob Marsico and Jessica Medenbach add an additional layer of lyricism and out-of-this-worldness to the performance, interlayering text, drawn imagery, and video with the live performance.

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Even if you’ve never seen the 1975 Maysles brothers cult documentary – or the 2009 fictionalized film – about Edith Bouvier Beale and “Little” Edie Beale, it’s likely you’ve caught wind at some point of the sordid gist of their story. Edith was Jackie Kennedy’s aunt; her daughter, “little Edie,” was Jackie’s cousin, and the discovery, in the early 1970s, that this pair of American aristocrats were living in almost indescribable squalor in their East Hampton family manse caused a considerable stir. How could these wealthy, high society women have fallen so very very low?

That’s the question the original documentary posed implicitly, and it’s the question posed explicitly at the beginning of the musical Grey Gardens,which was written by Doug Wright, with music by Scott Frankel and lyrics by Michael Korie. The musical opens in 1973, establishing the elderly Edith (Beth Johnstone Bush) and her daughter Edie (Daina Michelle Griffith) as two isolated, bickering biddies with way too many cats. It then flashes back, for the remainder of the first act, to 1941, as the grand, stately home is being readied for a party celebrating Edith’s engagement to Joseph Patrick Kennedy (Daniel Mayhak). Edie is “the girl who has everything,” her mother sings – and she does seem to have everything, except for parents who actually care about her emotional and psychological wellbeing.

The titles of the first act songs tell you everything you need to know about the toxic arch-patriarchal environment in which debs like Edie and her younger cousins Jackie and Lee Bouvier (Lucia Williams and Clara McGough) were groomed to take their place on the arms of future presidents, senators, oil tycoons, and Polish princes: “Body Beautiful Beale,” “Marry Well,” “Goin’ Places,” and “Daddy’s Girl.” Scott Frankel’s music is shot through with dissonance, a choice that lends an appropriately jangly energy to the action on stage, in which mother Edith (Griffiths) divides her time between imperiously arranging the details of the party, flirting with her boytoy accompanist George Gould Strong (Chad Elder), and sabotaging her daughter’s future happiness (young Edie is played in the first act by Kaylie Mae Wallace).

Daine Michelle Griffiths as “Little” Edie Bouvier Beale

Establishing the dysfunctional relationship between Edith and Edie is the main function of the first act. As Edie makes an attempt to escape her mother’s grip at the close of act one, Edith warbles “…I will be ever true…will you?” and upstage curtains open to reveal the decrepitude of their home thirty years in the future. Act two gains momentum as it plops us smack dab into the world of the Maysles documentary – that is, into a house overfilled with junked furniture and foul garbage, including more empty cat food tins than you really care to think about (the set, by Johnmichael Bohach, is so vividly realized that you can practically smell the stench of cat piss and rotting food). Griffiths is instantly recognizable as the middle-aged “little” Edie, thanks in part to Julianne D’Errico’s iconic costuming (on opening night, her entrance garnered a wave of appreciative and knowing applause), but also largely to her nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of the character, and especially of her precarious grip on reality. She captures Edie’s charm and charisma as well as her depression and despair (and the night I saw the show she also managed a masterful moment of improvisation in an attempt to get an audience member to silence a singing phone).

Director Robyne Parrish and music director Doug Levine have put together a tight production, one anchored by fine performances by the entire ensemble, but especially by Griffiths and Bush, who generate a lot of friction as they unspool the at-times bitter, and at-times weirdly loving, relationship between a narcissistic mother and daughter who can’t escape their need for each other’s suffocating attention.

Bazaar is the first of its kind and if you’ve ever participated in a Bricolage production, you should expect nothing less than an astounding sensory experience.

Indulge in local libations from Pennsylvania Pure Distilleries, Boyd & Blair Potato Vodka and BLY Silver Rum. Feed your inner child with a delightful array of festival food. Tantalize the senses in a collection of mini immersive stations, each one designed by different performers, artists, and designers.

Visit the Bricolage website to learn more. If for any reason you aren’t able to attend, please consider making a donation to Bricolage. Pittsburgh is lucky to have such an intrepid production company at its fingertips, and I’m excited to see what more they have in store.

Here is the Facebook event page, make sure to RSVP after you buy your ticket. Hope to see you there!

PS: For you adventurous theater-goers, costumes are encouraged. Run with it!